The Bolivarian Farce and the Anarchist Opposition

It seems many Socialists are getting very wet at the recent news of Venezuela being renamed and the apparent shift left by Chavez. Indeed, Socialist Worker in their last issue of Unity devoted their entire issue to the “Bolivarian Revolution”, waxing lyrical over the messianic figure of Chavez.

Since Chavez was re-elected once again for another 6 year term this last week, he has announced that he intends to nationalise the telecommunications industry, the electrical companies, abolish the commercial code which regulates economic transactions and end the independence of Venezuela’s central bank. This last change apparently requires Chavez to apply for increased executive powers to the National Assembly which he controls anyway.

But this “revolution” is nothing more than an alternative capitalist arrangement. The strengthening of state power, the nationalisation of industries and the boosting of welfare infrastructure (schools, health, unemployment support, etc.) represents little more than welfare capitalism. Or as the Venezualan anarchist organisation the Comisión de Relaciones Anarquistas (CRA) put it:

…no doubt the Chavez regime tries to impose state control mechanisms everywhere, but being such a corrupt and inept government, blinded by thinking that is building solid popular support turning part of the poorest people into clients dependent on the state’s dole, it’s going to cost them plenty to make any advances in that contradictory chimera that it calls “XXI Century Socialism”, which is nothing but an underdeveloped capitalism of the XIX Century. *

Poverty will likely be reduced, and a basic quality of life will increase, but the day to day reality for most people will be completely unchanged: they will still be subject to wage slavery, subject to the dictates of bosses or government bureaucracies, still faced with the eternal threat of poverty, harassed by the forces of the State, and rendered just as impotent as ever as to the creation of their own lives and the direction of their communities.

The classic anarchist opposition to a “workers’ state” was summed up well by the CNT just prior to the Spanish Revolution: “dictatorship of the proletariat is dictatorship without the proletariat and against them” (from the Confederal Conception of Libertarian Communism). The anarchist revolutionary aims of decentralisation, self-management, free association and the genuine socialisation of property are not only quite different to any notion of a workers state, but are actively opposed.

Of course, as with any class society the separation between rich and poor remains intact and the property of the national bourgeoisie in Venezuela is not threatened:

…property rights and the structure of the economy remain intact, largely because the government does not want to impede its revenue, prompting relief from the elite and grumbles from the radical left who want greater redistribution of resources. *

And with Venezuela’s nationalisation the national bourgeoisie have in fact become richer, quite content with Chavez’s changes. From an on-the-ground report:

The fruits were on display at a Caracas expo of luxury vehicles and speedboats. Staff at six stands interviewed by the Guardian all said business had never been so good.
“It’s ironic, this revolution. The rich are even richer now,” said Rene Diaz, who was selling Humvee-type 4x4s which cost up to $150,000. *

The main anarchist group in Venezuela, the CRA, continue to oppose both the faux-socialism of Chavez as well as the right through projects such as their national paper, El Libetario.

They see themselves as participants in a tri-polar struggle of their own, and have long positioned themselves in opposition to both the Chavez regime and to the US-backed opposition, borrowing the phrase popularized in Argentina in recent years: Que se vayan todos!, which translates roughly as Get rid of all of them! *

However, despite feeling that the anarchist movement there is undergoing a resurgence not felt in decades they still only occupy a marginal position and are absent from many key sectors of social struggle.

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anarchafairy

These are my musings, take them as they are.

I'm from Te Whanganui a Tara, Aotearoa. My main project is publishing radical literature from the deep South Pacific as part of Rebel Press, and also the irregular anarchist journal imminent rebellion.

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8 comments

Hi anarchafairy, I don’t have time to reply to your post properly right now, but I do think you take a one-sided view of the Bolivarian revolution, and a very extreme position as a result.

I can certainly understand why you might be suspicious of the idolisation of Chavez that is a feature of some Western leftist responses to events in Venezuela, and I can understand that you might feel that many of Chavez’s policies are insufficiently radical or broad-ranging, and some of his methods authoritarian.

But to go from these fairly sensible positions to a rejection of the Bolivarian revolution, lock, stock, and barrel, as nothing more than a top-down exercise in ‘welfare capitalism’ seems to me to be a big over-reaction.

The Bolivarian revolution is like a tennis match: there are two players, on opposite sides of the net: the Chavez government, on one side and the masses (workers, peasants, students etc), on the other. The two sides are responding to each other, in a dialectical process. The behaviour of one is influenced by the behaviour of the other. Chavez has become radicalised by pressure from below and hostility from imperialism.

The peasants and workers have won some major concessions from the Chavez government: the Land Law of 2001 and its subsequent amendments, which have enabled hundreds of thousands of landless peasants to establish farms, which are in many cases being run on principles close to those espoused by class struggle anarchists, as co-operatives or collectives; the nationalisation under workers’ control or worker-state joint management of numerous factories, most famously the Venepal paper mill in Moron (bad name, I know); the establishment of over 100,000 co-operatives in urban and semi-urban areas which operate democratically with the help of interest-free credit from the state; big leaps forward for women, with the establishment of laws against domestic violence, the first women’s sheleters, and a special bank to give low-interest loans to women’s co-operatives; and many more measures which I don’t have time to list here.

My point is that it is wrong to argue that the Bolivarian revolution promises nothing but capitalism and wage slavery: already, the revolution has liberated a significant (albeit still small) minority of workers from just this condition. The workers at Venepal know the difference between self-management and toiling for a MNC; so do the peasants who have established collective farms and co-operatives on land liberated from agribarons like Vesteys.

To be sure, the Bolivarian revolution is a work in progress and full of flaws, but so is any living revolution. El Libertario should be debating how to move the revolution forward, not opposing it outright.

That’s my five (or fifty!) cents worth anyway – I argue the same case at greater length in the paper I posted on my blog today. Good luck with the blogging – the site looks good…

“I can certainly understand why you might be suspicious of the idolisation of Chavez that is a feature of some Western leftist responses to events in Venezuela, and I can understand that you might feel that many of Chavez’s policies are insufficiently radical or broad-ranging, and some of his methods authoritarian.”

Hmm.. perhaps I didn’t make my position clear enough. It’s not that his positions aren’t radical enough. He could come out with whatever policies he likes and it wouldn’t constitute a social revolution as far as I’m concerned.

The only revolution I would support is one from below (and I should make clear that means no top – ie. not the bizarre Socialist Worker and Alliance model either), made by workers and communities, without insitutions or systems of authority or domination. That is, revolution as against the State, not through it.

This is what the Venezuelan anarchists refer to as the three way battle: against both the left and the right, both being premised on the existence and defence of the State.

But if you take this attitude seriously, as the folks who publish El Libertario appear to do, then you make United Front work with the vast majority of leftists and workers who are not anarchists impossible. It’s a case of ‘be an anarchist, or I won’t work with you’.

And then you end up counterposing, to the great mass movement that is the Bolivarian revolution, the promotion of an anarchist newspaper, as the CRA folks in Venezuela appear to be doing.

I doubt whether you would refuse to be involved in a strike or an anti-war campaign or a Maori land occupation just because the vast majority of people in said campaign
believed in some model of statist politics. I’m sure you’d beyond such differences and recognise that a wage rise or stopping a war or winning back stolen land was something worth supporting.

Shouldn’t a similar logic apply in Venezuela? Since I’ve already mentioned Venepal I’ll use it as an example here. The workers at Venepal lost their livelihoods when their bosses pulled the plug on the factory and took their capital out of the country as part of the attempt to bring down the Chavez government in 2002-2003.

The workers reoccupied the mill and got it running again, under their own leadership, making their own decisions democratically, with the support of their community.

But they lacked the capital to get the factory producing long-term, as well as a market for the paper products it produced, so they protested demanding that the government nationalise it under an arrangement that did not interfere with their ability to manage the enterprise for themselves, without bosses. After a massive campaign that involved the National Organisation of Workers, Venezuela’s trade union federation, the Chavez government nationalised Venepal under workers’ control. It also agreed to guarantee the purchase of the factory’s paper products, put capital in to maintain the machinery, and use the products for a socially useful purpose – namely, the printing of textbooks for new schools set up as part of the country’s literacy drive.

In recent years there have been a number of stikes at the Kinleith paper mill in Tokoroa, as workers with jobs very similar to those at Venepal fight globalisation and job losses. If you supported these strikes, which were demanding nothing more than better wages and limits to job cuts, shouldn’t you also support the workers at Venepal, who have actually gotten rid of their bosses and have reorientated production for socially useful purposes? Or are you going to wait until they all read El Libertario and decide to become anarchists?

Anyone with experience of social democratic governments such as what we have/had in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan will understand what remains after the triumph of State “socialism”. There is the initial honeymoon where certain reforms are put forward supported by both average and some “above” average people (money wise at least) for a time. In this province the social democratic CCF ( Canadian Commonwealth Federation ) was instrumental in establishing a British style health service which eventually became a “model” for the entire country. Of course in so doing they undermined the mutualist tradition of Cooperative Clinics which had been set up in 47 locations in this province. Likewise Cooperative medicine was an integral part of the early NHS in England. Over the years this genuinely socialist aspect of mutual aid gradually fell apart as the managerials, social workers, and professional “awareness” types gradually forced out real workers (and radical farmers) who actually built the early cooperative.labour,and social democratic movements. The same seems to have happened to social democratic parties in other countries. That is why we as anarchists and libertarian socialists are now forced to reclaim ground that was hard won by earlier generations,ie. “socialism” has become a dirty word and anarchism? … well we know what must people think when that term is used. So let’s try to learn from the past and not make the same mistakes. Anyway I like your blog and I’ll put a link on my own (Shagya) Blog to yours if that’s all right.

I agree with maps on his analysis of the revolution in Venezuela. You cant write off whats happening by just presenting Chavez as a cult of personality leader building a strong centrally planned state. Most of the movement in Venezuela has nothing to do with the state but is organised by workers and peasants on a self managed and decentralised basis.

People in Venezuela are building alternative methods for managing society from the ground up without the aid of the Chavez state. Often Chavez only legitimises the grassroots successes acheived from below through decree from above. It is naive to think of the world in terms of a dualistic black and white ideology between reactionaries and revolutionaries.

Why dont you read more about the non state movements in venezuela and the positive changes they are making by themselves instead of reading the analysis of the anarchist groups in Venezuela, who like here are overwhelmingly, middle class and white and whos only poilitical activism is to echo the the middle class parties in calling for the overthrow of Chavez.

Should we support Chavez unconditionally? No. But should we ignore the actual revolution unfolding in the streets and countryside, No. To do so would be ultra leftist stupidity.

I want to be clear that I am writing off Chavez and his “socialism” not due to his cult of personality, and not just because it is occurring through a strong centrally planned State, but because it is occurring through the State at all. It is top-down change which I think can only be a reactionary force.

This post was aimed to argue against the “Bolivarian socialism” that the like of Socialist Worker are celebrating, which is not the socialism of the streets, but the socialism of the State.

But you’ve created a straw-man and obviously missed my argument that I’ve advanced here and in the anarcho-charity thread: I fully support the bottom-up social change that most certainly is occurring in Venezuela. But I know that the success of these movements depends on their evasion of being smothered, swallowed or integrated into the various institutions of the Venezuelan State that Chavez is setting up. Maps seems to think they can exist in a tentative balance with these State forces, but I disagree.

The Venezuelan State and its “socialism” is opposed to the socialism of the street, as far as I’m concerned. And if these two forces meet there must either be conflict or the death of any revolutionary possibilities.

“Should we support Chavez unconditionally? No.” How about conditionally? I certainly hope not.

I would love to see your sources with regards to the composition and orientation of the Venezuelan anarchists.